Friday, February 18, 2011

Setting a precedent

We have some new anti-exploitation rules coming for the dungeon finder. Some good stuff in there, but the thing that especially caught my eye was:

If queuing as a group with a tank or healer, and the tank or healer drops group (or is kicked) soon after joining, those that queued with them will also be removed from the dungeon.

Now this is interesting. Is this the first time that tanks and healers have officially received special treatment by the game?

I completely understand the rationale behind this rule; I've exploited both sides of this "queue with a tank class" trick at various times, and it is very clearly an exploit in my opinion.

But this new by-law creates a situation where a DPS player's place in the group can be, albeit temporarily, completely dependent on a tank or healer. The game assumes that if you queue as DPS and there is a tank in your group, you are the leech, being carried by the tank. I have a lot of trouble agreeing with a system that blatantly profiles players like this.

Now that we have this official "admission" that tanks and healers are more important, I'm very interested to see whether it goes any further. I for one would love to see a weighted system, where the rewards scale with the demand for that role at that time. I don't care what the incentive is-- gold, points, rep, critter pets [hah, now that's a good idea]-- more is needed to offset the vast imbalance in supply/demand. Clearly queue length alone isn't doing it, and the imbalance isn't going to go away on its own.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About me

My name's Chris and this is my blog. I've decided to stop confining myself to any specific topic. Video games have been fascinating to me for a long time, but we all eventually outgrow our environment.